Remembering the Euroskeptic Brussels actually liked

Theirs was a friendship made in Brussels — a bond between a Euroskeptic and Europhile forged over fights about the EU budget.

The Euroskeptic was Jens-Peter Bonde, a longtime Danish MEP who was a pioneer in efforts to make the EU more transparent. The Europhile was Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Luxembourg prime minister and later European Commission president.

“I had a good relationship with him, it was quite curious,” Juncker told POLITICO in a phone interview. “From a party-political point of view, the two of us were far away,” he said. 

Juncker was among many EU veterans mourning the passing of Bonde, who died this past week at the age of 73.

And Juncker’s memories of his decades-long amity with Bonde, despite their opposing ideologies, has not been an anomaly within the Brussels bubble in the days since Bonde’s passing. For a politician who spent decades needling his colleagues, criticizing the EU and using his own arcane knowledge of the institution to energetically pursue his Euroskeptic agenda, Bonde was well-respected in Brussels for his principled intelligence and collegiality.

In fact, most described his lasting legacy as pushing the EU to become more transparent and democratic — strengthening it rather than tearing it down. 

“I’m deeply sad that he passed away,” Juncker said.

Bonde was a member of the European Parliament from 1979 until 2008 — earning the nickname “Mr. Transparency” and a reputation for making those in power uncomfortable. 

“He was Euroskeptical — at least when he entered the European Parliament,” recalled Juncker. “Later on, he became more and more Europe-friendly.”

Bonde began his political career in the youth wing of the Danish Social Liberal Party, later moving to the Danish Communist Party and winning a seat in the European Parliament as part of the People’s Movement against the EU. 

Over the years, Bonde came to focus on reforming the EU from within, playing an influential role during Denmark’s 1992 referendum rejecting the Maastricht Treaty, a foundational EU pact that paved the way for the common currency and citizenship. He then joined the so-called June Movement, opposing greater Danish EU integration but stopping short of pushing to exit the bloc.

The Danish politician often clashed with European leaders, but he also won their respect. 

“It was difficult for me and difficult for him to discover deeper differences and divergences,” said Juncker of his many debates with his friend. 

The Luxembourgish center-right politician got to know Bonde well in the early to mid-1980s, when Juncker served as his country’s budget minister and Bonde was a member of the European Parliament’s Budgets Committee.

“I remember days when he was angry with me — maybe when it came to the budget, because things were always difficult when it came to budgets in Europe,” Juncker said. As Juncker retold it: “We were shouting, we were fighting, but it didn’t take away the friendship I had for him.” 

Bonde, Juncker said, “had his own opinions,” but he “was very tolerant” and a “good listener.”

In Brussels, Bonde was known for pushing EU institutions to open up — he, for instance, pressed the bloc to make public the minutes from Commission meetings.

In a 2004 book, he recalled trying to convince Commission President Romano Prodi to publish comprehensive meeting notes. Bonde wrote that he approached Prodi with “two piles of paper.” One, he told Prodi, were the minutes “you publish on the Internet and send to the Parliament.” The other, he said, were the minutes “you distribute internally.”

The public minutes were 10-12 pages. The internal minutes? “Around 100 pages.”

“One pile clearly showed what had been discussed within the Commission, while the other showed what the Commission wanted the public to see,” Bonde wrote. “‘Mamma mia,’ Romano exclaimed spontaneously. I am absolutely sure he was genuinely surprised.”

Indeed, the longtime MEP had an assertive demeanor, never shying away from a fight.

“He was physically imposing, but it was mainly his thunderous, gravelly voice that made his presence felt,” said Transparency International EU Director Michiel van Hulten, who served alongside the Danish politician in the European Parliament. 

“When he stood up in plenary, you knew that he was about to make someone feel very uncomfortable,” Van Hulten recalled. “He was a permanent thorn in the side of all those in positions of authority.”

Those who knew him say Bonde — who wrote many books during his time as a politician — was the kind of MEP who understood the smallest technicalities of EU policy. 

Søren Søndergaard, a former MEP and current member of the Danish parliament for the Red-Green Alliance, said Bonde “was used as a kind of think tank about EU matters, knowing every paragraph.” But at the same time, Søndergaard said that Bonde was also an “activist” who “was deeply involved in how to organize a campaign.”

Bonde’s role in the Brussels bubble, however, differed from his role at home. 

“There were two sides to him,” said Uffe Østergaard, a professor emeritus at Copenhagen Business School who co-wrote a book with Bonde. 

“In Denmark he was perceived as anti-Europe, and in Europe he was considered an efficient democrat,” he said, adding that Bonde wanted “transparency and democracy” — advocating, for example, for the direct election of European Commission presidents.

Ole Ryborg, a correspondent in Brussels for Danish radio and television who knew Bonde for 30 years, said his lasting legacy within the EU was his “pressure for more transparency, for access to documents.”  

Former Commission President José Manuel Barroso said that the Danish MEP “was a constructive leader of an odd group.” 

“While we disagreed on some issues (he was sometimes very critical of the EU), we agreed on the need for reforms and increased accountability,” Barroso said in a note penned for Bonde’s memoirs and shared with POLITICO. 

And while he maintained a reputation as a Euroskeptic, former colleagues say that his approach differed from other anti-EU campaigners. 

Bonde “was a Euroskeptic before Euroskepticism became fashionable,” said Van Hulten, of Transparency International, noting he was “unlike” his British counterparts such as Brexiteer Nigel Farage.

“You always felt that Bonde was driven not by short-term political expediency but by a genuine and deeply-held commitment to democracy, transparency and accountability,” he said.  

Bonde, Van Hulten, added, “was relentless in his pursuit of cases of fraud, corruption and mismanagement, which he felt were being covered up by the powers that be. Ironically, by becoming such a fixture of EU politics, he also helped legitimize the very system that he opposed.”